• 3 Posts
  • 316 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • What are you talking about? I don’t think you understood the concept of decentralised torrent-like hosting.

    I’m currently talking to a peertube hoster about server costs, which I may be able to justify to host my own videos plus a little extra to pitch in for others who can’t justify the expense. Plenty of professional creators could easily justify it as an exit strategy or backup for youtube.

    These conversations are happening, just not with you, presumably because you’re just being negative about it and not actually doing something, so why would anyone bother to bring it up with you?


  • Take out the phone part and allow users to host videos in a decentralised way on their home computers and it’s a genuinely good idea though. I have a server running with plenty of storage and reasonable upload speed. I could easily dedicate a terabyte or so, as long as I’m not the sole hoster.

    It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than dedicated hosting. The only issue is legal problems when someone is unknowingly hosting abuse material, which is something that happens from time to time on all services like this, and an individual could be done for distribution without the protection big centralised services have. You’d just have to hope mods are on top of it.

    Actually something like a debrid service but for peertube might work. You can get huge amounts of storage for cheap because a lot of it is shared, you might ask them to host a huge torrent file, but most torrent files serve multiple users, so the cost is distributed. Peertube could work a similar way if it were more mainstream.


  • If the judge said it then it would have been established fact in the case. This can be established by evidence and found as fact in the case, or it can be part of the agreed facts of the case, in which case the court doesn’t waste time hearing evidence. All it takes to become agreed fact is for the defence to present it as part of their case and for the prosecution to not dispute it.

    In that context the finding of fact by the court is more than enough for the paper to report on it, and the two versions presented by you of it being said by the defence and by the judge, are entirely compatible with one another. Nobody is going to demand to see the boy’s medical history to verify an uncontroversial point like this. That would just be a waste of time.

    The papers presented it as stated by the defence and the judge, they said nothing false or misleading, and I don’t see any problem with that part of their reporting.

    Now, if you have an issue that it was reported because it casts autistic people in a bad light, the issue becomes whether you think it’s something the papers should leave out. Well, the defence considered it important, and it became news. Not much we can do about that after the fact.




  • It’s an illusion. People think that because the language model puts words into sequences like we do, there must be something there. But we know for a fact that it is just word associations. It is fundamentally just predicting the most likely next word and generating it.

    If it helps, we have something akin to an LLM inside our brain, and it does the same limited task. Our brains have distinct centres that do all sorts of recognition and generative tasks, including images, sounds and languge. We’ve made neural networks that do these tasks too, but the difference is that we have a unifying structure that we call “consciousness” that is able to grasp context, and is able to loopback the different centres into one another to achieve all sorts of varied results.

    So we get our internal LLM to sequence words, one word after another, then we loop back those words via the language recognition centre into the context engine, so it can check if the words match the message it intended to create, it checks them against its internal model of the world. If there’s a mismatch, it might ask for different words till it sees the message it wanted to see. This can all be done very fast, and we’re barely aware of it. Or, if it’s feeling lazy today, it might just blurt out the first sentence that sprang to mind and it won’t make sense, and we might call that a brain fart.

    Back in the 80s “automatic writing” took off, which was essentially people tapping into this internal LLM and just letting the words flow out without editing. It was nonesense, but it had this uncanny resemblance to human language, and people thought they were contacting ghosts, because obviously there has to be something there, right? But it’s not, it’s just that it sounds like people.

    These LLMs only produce text forwards, they have no ability to create a sentence, then examine that sentence and see if it matches some internal model of the world. They have no capacity for context. That’s why any question involving A inside B trips them up, because that is fundamentally a question about context. "How many Ws in the sentence “Howard likes strawberries” is a question about context, that’s why they screw it up.

    I don’t think you solve that without creating a real intelligence, because a context engine would necessarily be able to expand its own context arbitrarily. I think allowing an LLM to read its own words back and do some sort of check for fidelity might be one way to bootstrap a context engine into existence, because that check would require it to begin to build an internal model of the world. I suspect the processing power and insights required for that are beyond us for now.








  • I cut a big nerve in my thumb years ago, and apparently plastic surgeons fix that sort of thing.

    They reattached the nerve bundles, but I was told the sheathes could be realigned, but the nerves would have to grow back from the point of the cut all the way to the skin.

    At first one half of my thumb was entirely numb, and over the course of well over a decade I’d get pins & needles as bunches of nerves would finish regrowing, except attached to random channels in the nerve bundle, so my brain had to completely remap all those signals to what they actually meant. Also extreme nerve pain near the cut whenever it was bumped, I assume because many nerves just didn’t grow successfully and remained near that site.

    It felt super weird because hot, cold, pain & touch were all mixed up, but eventually my brain sorted them out. It still feels a little weird, especially near my nail, but I haven’t had a pins & needles experience for a few years.

    The problem with doing that with a neck is that it would take wayyy longer and the chances of the patient dying from complications due to no brain signals working right… yeah I don’t see medical science fixing this unless we can regrow nerves in a much shorter span of time.